New Connect website Reviews includes ratings with no text - Useless Noise IMO

On that matter, since they just changed the way they deliver those stats I updated my stats downloader script:

github.com/.../garmin-download-stats.sh

jim_m_58 said:

As I said, it really doesn't bother me

Well, if it doesn’t bother you, I guess it’s OK.

The fact is, it has no value and makes reading reviews harder.

Your argument for it (making it easy to complain about empty 1 star ratings) doesn’t make much sense either.

I had a look at the names of the users who gave reviews/stars. I realized that it would be of great help if we knew their language settings. Well not even per user but as a percentage to know how much percentage of the users use what language as system setting (and not which translation of the app is used - probably the default - as the point would be to see which language it is worth translating to.

I think a great compromise would be for Garmin to do what Amazon does: show a breakdown of the starred ratings by percentage (or absolute numbers), which is actually valuable information that still isn't directly shown. (Sure, now somebody can probably write a script to extract this kind of data from the website, but it's not readily available.)

This is better than just showing the average rating, since, at least in the past, the number of 1-star Amazon ratings was a much better indicator of a poor product compared to the average rating. It was common internet wisdom to ignore the average rating of a product you were interested in, and just look at the ratio of 1-star reviews to total reviews, and also to read some of the bad reviews as well.

I don't think anyone needs to see the names of all the people who left ratings without text reviews. As seen below, Amazon doesn't think so either. Say what you want about Amazon, but they're probably better at the whole "online marketplace" thing than Garmin.

To satisfy the demographic (of one) that believes any 1-star rating without text should automatically be reported to Garmin as "abusive", Garmin could add a "report as abusive" link to the email it sends to the dev for both ratings and reviews.

Also, note the language that Amazon uses: "X total ratings, Y with reviews".

Therefore:

- A "rating" is the customer's quantitative 1 to 5 star selection to rate the quality of the product (with or without an accompanying review)

- A "review" is the customer's qualitative text description of the product (which is always accompanied by a starred rating)

Yes, the UIs for both amazon and the connect iq store sort of muddy the waters, but it's clear that most people don't think of a starred rating as a "review without text". On the contrary, amazon emphasizes ratings: there's all ratings (with or without reviews/text), and there's ratings with reviews/text.

Also, to be fair, Garmin does call both types of feedback "reviews" as far as the email notifications go. So Garmin is sort of presenting a rating as a review without text, if you take your notification emails literally. Just because Garmin does it, it doesn't mean we all agree with it tho.

FlowState said:

- A "rating" is the customer's quantitative 1 to 5 star selection to rate the quality of the product (with or without an accompanying review)

- A "review" is the customer's qualitative text description of the product (which is always accompanied by a starred rating)

What I said.

Also look at how Apple and Google do this for apps.

jim_m_58 said:

I point users to contact developer or the showcase thread vs using reviews for a question or even a bug, as in reviews, it's often very unclear what device/fw is involved etc.  With the other methods, I can ask questions, maybe ask for a picture of what the user sees. etc, and can usually get them happy and running in a short time.  That of course might lead to a good review!

That way reviews aren't cluttered by something that only 1 of 500 users have seen or is confused about.

So you dislike the list of reviews being "cluttered" by bug reports. That's understandable.

jim_m_58 said:

Therefore I don't mind the reviews with no text

But you're ok with dozens or hundreds of "reviews with no text"? You don't consider those to be cluttering up the list of reviews?

As others pointed out, this will simply persuade the vast majority of users to not read reviews at all.

As I've suggested, a better compromise would be to list the percentages or absolute numbers of star ratings (i.e. number of 1-star ratings, number of 2-star ratings, ... number of 5-star ratings). That way users have the same information (other than the names of the raters) without the massive clutter.

jim_m_58 said:

unless it's a 1 star, as that makes it clear the user didn't read the beginning of the app description....

Of course you're assuming that a 1-star rating is due to the user encountering a bug or some other issue that's potentially resolvable by contacting you via Contact Developer or the forum thread.

It's just not possible that someone disliked the app for reasons you can't control and decided to leave a 1-star rating.

If you believe truly believe that "reviews with no text" (AKA ratings with no review) are inherently bad, then you should be in favor of requiring users to enter a text review when they rate an app, as you've said earlier in the thread. In order to be fair, this requirement should apply to 5-star reviews as well as 1-star reviews. I guarantee that you that the vast majority of people who would've left either a positive or negative rating (with no review/text) will not bother to leave a text review just so they can rate your app. This can be seen in every online store (including Connect IQ) where the number of reviews is a fraction of the number of ratings.

Given that people tend to only type stuff when they have something to complain about (just look at these forums), this will probably cause every app's average rating to plummet.

FlowState said:

But you're ok with dozens or hundreds of "reviews with no text"?

Can you point me to any apps where there are "hundreds" of blank reviews?  I sure don't see it!  Maybe some paid apps where you get a free unlock code for a 5-star review.  I've seen developers advertise this in the past! It makes the rating for that app kind of meaningless to begin with. It's not a rating, but a way for the user to get something free,

Or it could be a bot/fake users someone uses to inflate their ratings.

That is very odd, as there are very few reviews with text, and the number of reviews also seems odd.  Looks like one review per 24 downloads.

How/where are you asking for reviews?  You using something like kpay?

I have apps with 200,000 downloads and only a couple hundred reviews in total, with all but a very  few having text

Doesn't matter how/where I ask for reviews (all thru Garmin BTW).